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Probability, Probability-Based, and Nonprobability Surveys in Psychiatric Epidemiological Research
Yajuan Si1, James R Wagner1, Ronald C Kessler2
1Survey Research Center, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Importance:
As mental health challenges continue to increase globally, using rigorous surveillance frameworks is essential for delivering nuanced population-level insights and informing evidence-based policy decisions.
Objective:
To develop a standard for using nonprobability and probability-based online panel surveys in psychiatric epidemiological research.
Evidence Review:
The traditional use of high-quality probability samples to carry out psychiatric epidemiological surveys of the household population is facing increasing financial and operational challenges. Surveys from nonprobability and probability-based online panels have emerged as cost-effective alternatives with the additional advantage of rapid turnaround time, albeit with biases that can in some cases be substantial.
Findings:
We recommend a middle ground of integrating surveys from online panels with small parallel high-quality probability samples to enhance the practicality of carrying out large-scale epidemiological studies while maintaining validity. The key features of such "hybrid designs" are as follows: use of a high-quality probability sample as a population surrogate to provide information about the distributions of otherwise unavailable variables that differentiate participants in online panels from the larger household population, inclusion in both surveys of measures that are both strongly associated with the outcomes of interest and strongly predictive of membership in the online panel, and use of best-practice statistical methods that blend results across the 2 samples. Such a hybrid design should be the minimally acceptable design for psychiatric epidemiological surveys of the household population given the biases known to exist in online panels. However, we also comment on several other designs that might be used for more rapid and less expensive exploratory analyses.
Conclusions And Relevance:
Hybrid designs address both the biases of surveys from online panels and the operational problems of surveys from high-quality probability samples. They should be the minimally acceptable design for psychiatric epidemiological surveys of the household population.
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